This week was slow until someone posted wondering where everyone was. Someone mentioned the automatic news gathering systems like Google News, and mentioned that Microsoft was working on one: “When I first checked the french version, http://fr.newsbot.msn.com, its lead story was a link to a two-paragraph story on a french business site about “Playboy et les femmes de WalMart deshabille” — illustrated with a head shot of Donald Rumsfeld. For all the early glitches that people reported on Google News, I never saw anything any way near that bad.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

I hate html in emails, and I guess Outlook 2003 now blocks it by default (because otherwise it would spread viruses, which all previous versions of Outlook have been experts at). Someone brought up this issue from a designer’s point of view. A lot of the newsletters that people actually signed up for were being bounced back. Some people agreed with me that even if readers can turn the blocking off, would they want to? Journalists can track traffic with html newsletters, but users don’t care about that.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

This week people talked about a couple of options for accepting and serving ads for a low-volume site. It was interesting to see a few open source projects on this. I’ll definitely take a look at these later, because I’ve worked on sites in the past that tried running banner ads and the solutions we came up with were always less than optimal.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.